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Which One of You Nuts: How Jack Nicholson Made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Little Movie That Ate Hollywood On November 19, 1975, a small, strange film opened in American theaters. It had no car chases, no happy ending, and a leading man who spends half the movie pretending to be insane inside a real mental hospital. It was made for about $4.4 million — pocket change even…
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Genesis: The Schoolboy Bond That Outlasted Fame
On March 26, 2022, at London’s O2 Arena, Phil Collins sat in a chair at center stage and told the crowd it was the last show Genesis would ever play. He could no longer stand for a full concert, let alone play the drums. His son Nic sat behind the kit instead. And out in…
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How Genesis Made “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”: The Album That Broke the Band
In the summer of 1974, Genesis rented a crumbling country house, moved in with their instruments, and tried to make the most ambitious record of their lives. What came out, four months later, was “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,” a double album about a Puerto Rican street kid’s surreal journey through a subterranean New…
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Harrison Ford: The Reluctant Legend
The Man Who Never Wanted to Be Famous Harrison Ford has spent half a century being one of the most recognizable faces on earth, and he has spent nearly all of that time visibly annoyed about it. He doesn’t do the Hollywood game — the red-carpet charm, the carefully curated mystique, the eager press-tour smile.…
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The Carpenter Who Became Han Solo: How Harrison Ford Made Star Wars
The Nobody Who Walked In With a Toolbox On the morning of May 25, 1977, a movie opened in just thirty-two American theaters. Nobody in Hollywood expected much from it. The director was a quiet thirty-three-year-old named George Lucas, fresh off the surprise hit American Graffiti, and the film was a strange little space opera…
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Jon Bon Jovi: The Rock Star Who Married His High School Sweetheart
Rock stardom and lasting love are supposed to be incompatible. The road, the fame, the temptations, the decades, they are supposed to grind every romance into tabloid dust. Jon Bon Jovi never got that memo. The frontman who has spent forty years singing about runaways and prayers has been married to the same woman since…
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The Short Kid from L.A. Who Refused to Be a Movie Star
Dustin Hoffman was never supposed to be famous. He said so himself, many times, with the bewildered gratitude of a man who still can’t quite believe his luck. He was too short. His teeth had braces. His face, in his own brutal assessment, had “one of the worst cases of acne in California.” In the…
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How Bon Jovi Survived the Nineties: The Making of “Keep the Faith”
In the autumn of 1991, the biggest rock band in America was barely a band at all. Bon Jovi had spent most of the previous decade on the road, sold tens of millions of records, and played to stadiums on every continent. They were also exhausted, estranged, and staring down a musical landscape that had…
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“Definitely, Definitely”: The Beautiful Disaster Behind Rain Man
When Rain Man opened in December 1988, nobody in Hollywood expected it to become the biggest movie in the world. It was a mid-budget drama about an autistic savant and his selfish brother on a cross-country road trip — the kind of film studios called “a hard sell.” It went through three directors, six writers,…
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Janet Jackson: The Private Heart Behind the Spotlight
For four decades, Janet Jackson has been one of the most watched women on earth, and one of the least known. She grew up on television, became a pop revolutionary, survived a career-threatening public shaming, and did it all while keeping her inner life locked away from the cameras. The 2022 documentary that finally bore…